Word.ws English Dictionary

dieselpunk

dieselpunk noun: a genre of science fiction and art that combines fictional retrofuturistic elements with the technology, culture, and aesthetics of the period of history beginning in the interbellum between World War I and World War II and ending around the 1950s (known as the "diesel era" within the dieselpunk community).

dieselpunk: a genre of science fiction and art that combines fictional retrofuturistic elements with the...
Image: Stefan Prohaczka, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

dieselpunk (uncountable)

  1. A genre of science fiction and art that combines fictional retrofuturistic elements with the technology, culture, and aesthetics of the period of history beginning in the interbellum between World War I and World War II and ending around the 1950s (known as the "diesel era" within the dieselpunk community).
    • In other words, steampunk explores adjustment to an industrial culture from the opposite direction to cyberpunk -- but has very much the same agenda. Me, I'm trying to write dieselpunk ...2002 November 20, Charlie Stross, “Re: What "steampunk" genre?”, in rec.arts.sf.written (Usenet)
    • […] post-apocalyptic dieselpunk action adventure […]2007, Sean Demory, quoted in Brian McTavish, "Kansas City writer, artist publish digital comic book for cell phones", in The Kansas City Star, 2007 July 25, page F3

Origin of dieselpunk

From diesel + -punk.

Questions about dieselpunk

What does dieselpunk mean?
Dieselpunk means a genre of science fiction and art that combines fictional retrofuturistic elements with the technology, culture, and aesthetics of the period of history beginning in the interbellum between World War I and World War II and ending around the 1950s (known as the "diesel era" within the dieselpunk community).
What part of speech is dieselpunk?
Dieselpunk is a noun.

Words near dieselpunk in the dictionary

  1. dieselized
  2. dieselizes
  3. dieselizing
  4. dieselled
  5. dieselling
  6. dieselpunk
  7. diesels
  8. diesely
  9. dieses
  10. diesinker
  11. diesinkers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dieselpunk (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “dieselpunk.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dieselpunk. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.